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Tom Barton: Some Georgia Democrats don't know Jack about Kingston

Many people who used to live in Savannah find a way to return here each year for the St. Patrick’s Day parade.

That includes Jack Kingston.

The Savannah congressman, who’s in the thick of this year’s campaign for a seat in the U.S. Senate, hasn’t been spending much time at home lately.

The Republican House member is like a smart fisherman. If you want to catch more fish than the competition, then you must find the spot where the most fish are biting. That’s the metro Atlanta suburbs — the GOP-rich waters of Gwinnett, Cobb, Cherokee and Forsyth counties.

Kingston’s statewide campaign office is in Duluth, not far from the Gwinnett Place Mall. Putting it there was good politics — except his commute is a beast.

“This is the first time I’ve been home in three weeks,” Kingston said Monday morning at the annual “Crack O’Dawn” breakfast, an outdoor feeding hosted every year by the Blackburn and Foran families just blocks away from the start of the parade.

It probably felt good to be back — if only briefly — in familiar confines and sporting a green blazer. But Kingston is a grinder. None of the other four major contenders in the crowded GOP field is going to out-work him. He also gets along with people. He’s liked personally (if not politically) by many Democrats.

Except there’s one wild card in the Senate race that Kingston — or any of the other Republican candidates — can’t control: The number of Georgia Democrats who will cross over and vote in the GOP primary on May 20.

It’s perfectly legal.

Georgia allows registered voters to cast ballots in either the Republican or Democratic party on primary day. Typically, voters stick with their own political kind in these intramural food fights. But crossover voting isn’t unknown. Local Republicans used it in 1991 to help Susan Weiner win Savannah’s mayor’s race. So if Democrats want to be equally sneaky, that’s their call.

Statewide, 2014 isn’t a typical election year in Georgia. Democrats, who once dominated Georgia politics, have a Senate candidate who’s not a dud.

Democrat Michelle Nunn, daughter of former Sen. Sam Nunn, hopes to turn this red state blue. Her primary contest is a snooze. So to help her in November, many Dems may vote in the Republican primary for the GOP candidate they believe is the easiest for Nunn to beat.

I know this because several yellow dog Democrats have told me so. Their preferred pick: Paul Broun, the Republican congressman from Athens.

“He’s so far to the right that he can’t even see the middle,” one of them said. “If Broun’s the nominee, Michelle has a good shot.”

Interestingly, a just-released poll of about 500 Republicans and Democrats by Public Policy Polling — a lefty group — showed Broun leading the GOP pack at 27 percent. That’s almost double the numbers for Kingston and the other GOP candidates (Phil Gingery, David Perdue and Karen Handel).

Is this evidence of a crossover effect? Probably.

Will it vault Nunn into the Senate? Probably not. Too many Georgians still see a Nunn vote as a vote to keep the Senate in the control of the Democrats and Harry Reid.

Certainly, they have every right to vote Republican in the primary. But before they leap for that GOP ballot, they should do something else: Think what could happen if the weakest candidate becomes Georgia’s next U.S. senator.